By Helena Andrews
“Omnium finis imminet.” The end is here.
So warns NBC's miniseries Revelations, based on the similarly named book of the Bible. It premiered April 13 at 9 p.m.
Critics are calling it Hollywood's latest attempt to hop on the religion bandwagon. But an influential professor of popular culture says putting the Bible in prime time is a rerun of an old TV strategy.
The six-part series by writer/creator David Seltzer of The Omen debuts just two weeks after Pope John Paul II's death and chronicles the religious conflict between a man of science and a woman of God with the impending end of the world as backdrop.
The series, which will fill in for The West Wing this spring, stars Bill Pullman of Independence Day and Natascha McElhone of Solaris.
In Revelations, astrophysicist Dr. Richard Massey (Pullman), whose daughter has been murdered by Satanists, and Sister Josepha Montafiore (McElhone), who is convinced Christ has been reborn, team up to save the world from apocalypse.
“All the signs and symbols are currently in place for the end of days,” says Montafiore, who is trying desperately to convince Massey, a nonbeliever, that the Bible's prophecies are real.
With NBC keeping open the possibility of Revelations returning as a regular series, it seems religion is becoming more marketable than ever. Popular culture has already embraced movies like The Passion of the Christ, other TV series such as Joan of Arcadia and books like the wildly successful Left Behind series.
But is this a voyage into a new spiritual frontier for TV programming or a return trip?
In the early days of television, networks hired vice presidents of religious programming to oversee the development of multidenominational shows, notes Robert Thompson, professor of popular culture at Syracuse University in Syracuse, N.Y. Talk shows like Life is Worth Living hosted by Bishop Fulton Sheen competed successfully with other popular programs.
During the 1970s, Thompson said, “religion became verboten for a long time” because the networks decided to forego topics of politics and religion in order to retain larger viewing audiences.
“Prime time was completely unrelated to what was going on in the news at 11 p.m.,” Thompson said, referring to the absence of political shows in popular programming during the Vietnam War.
But with the advent of cable in the 1980s, audience retention was less an issue and shows like Highway to Heaven and later Touched by an Angel found their way back to primetime.
Still, these weekly series were more “feel good” television than sophisticated theological analysis.
“So many Americans go to church on Christmas and Easter,” Thompson said, “but they don't want to go for the rest of the year. I'm not sure they would want to watch a series that really dealt with religious issues.”
Jerry B. Jerkins, co-author of the Left Behind book series that also deals with biblical end times, described Revelations as “a mishmash of myth, silliness and misrepresentations of scripture [that] seems to draw from everywhere and nowhere.”
Jerkins and co-author Tim LaHaye have sparked their own controversy with their novel series that has sold more than 60 million copies because of what some see as an “us against them” take on the apocalypse. It has yet to be seen whether Revelations will do the same.
According to LaHaye, who is the scripture expert of the duo, “man has to be ready to die and spend his eternity somewhere.” The Left Behind series makes it clear that all but Christians will be spending their afterlives somewhere other than heaven.
“There are some wonderful people … that you almost think deserve heaven,” LaHaye told Fox's Bill O'Reilly in a recent interview, “But God said there's only one way, and that's by receiving his son, Jesus Christ.”
Thompson described the book of Revelation as “ripe fodder” for both the miniseries and books like LaHaye's because “it's so hard to kind of get to the bottom of, which means you can really take a lot of liberties.”
Religion News Service
Helena Andrews writes for RNS.